"Wal-Mart Stores Inc. reported a 14% rise in fiscal first-quarter
earnings on a 9.5% increase in sales, but the results fell short of the
company’s expectations because of high gasoline prices and cool, wet
spring weather."

Its a shame there isn’t some sort of aphorism or nursery rhyme that could clue us in to the extremely unlikely possibility of increased precipitation in the fourth month of the year. Who knows? Maybe this unusual weather activity might generate a significant uptick in foliage bloomings in the fifth month?

I’m going to have to go back to the Farmer’s almanac and see if I can’t figure out this difficult, meteorological conundrum.

Rain in the Spring. Who’da thunk it?

>

UPDATE May 12, 2005 10:16amIt turns out there actually is a way to figure out the weather in the Spring! You can hear it here, or read it here.

Please use the comments to demonstrate your own ignorance, unfamiliarity with empirical data and lack of respect for scientific knowledge. Be sure to create straw men and argue against things I have neither said nor implied. If you could repeat previously discredited memes or steer the conversation into irrelevant, off topic discussions, it would be appreciated. Lastly, kindly forgo all civility in your discourse . . . you are, after all, anonymous.

7 Responses to “A cool, wet spring”

I don’t know about the Wal-marts in your area, but I avoid our local Wal-mart like the plague. It is dirty, congested and in general dissarray. Target, on the other hand, is a totally different experience. Clean, uncongested and ordered. I think a lot of people just don’t like the experience of going to Wal-mart.

Note also “high gasoline prices”. This triggers my proprietary version of the “magazine cover indicator” which I call the “retailer excuse indicator”; any economic trend has more or less reached its end by the time it is commonly used as an excuse for poor performance by retailers. In the UK, we’re hearing about bad sales “because of the housing market”, I kid you not.

If I ran a retailer then once in a while, just for a laugh, I would put out a press release saying “D2 Stores beat expectations by 5c with strong 15% same-store growth. However, this was nothing to do with management competence and entirely a result of favourable weather conditions and a late Easter”.

Yesterday investors initially shrugged off Wal-Mart’s weak earnings news, partly because strong overall retail sales for April were announced at around the same time and weren’t half bad. But during the day investors became increasingly worried that Wa…

Thanks for the Eliot, j. A person who can read poetry and attend econ blogs is a rare bird.

dsquared, folks don’t ask questions, questions about not-so-good outcomes, like “What Happened?” just to hear “I dunno”, so unlike that old Greek, we feel compelled to say something, yes?

Our sense of marketing is deeply violated with this (“I dunno”) stunning response. Why is the client passing up an opportunity to hide in the herd (‘all of us performed pretty much the same’)? Why has “the weather” response eluded him? Is he trying to sell us a different set of goods with this “I dunno” stuff? Has he no decency? I dunno.
You may have the UK experience in front of you but I’m not sure that “the housing market” is in the same boat as “the weather”.
I kid you not.

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Ritholtz has been observing capital markets with a critical eye for 20 years. With a background in math & sciences and a law school degree, he is not your typical Wall St. persona. He left Law for Finance, working as a trader, researcher and strategist before graduating to asset managementRead More...

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